The transition

[Stefan Mikes]

Largely because of the simple fact that one huge fire (e.g. in a coal plant) is much more efficient than millions of tiny fires in engines all over the place, an EV even running off of fossil fuels is about twice as efficient end-to-end as a fossil burner. This is basic thermodynamics.

I wouldn't like you to educate me -- a professional process engineer -- what the thermodynamics is. The amount of energy to propel all the cars, buses and lorries is the same regardless of the fuel. That amount is affected by the efficiency, which manifests itself in so many places in the chain.

The only difference between millions of well contained ICE fires (think of cleaner and cleaner fuel and the catalyst in the exhaust) and a smaller number of powerplant fires is the distribution of the emission. If all powerplants were fired with fossil fuel, the difference in the amount of the emission would mainly depend on the overall efficiency of each chain. Well, if all powerplants were nuclear and the rest of the electricity came from solar, wind, or hydro, the situation would be different. As is is now, it is only shifting the emission from distributed to concentrated.

And even an EV that is charged on electrons from fossil fuels produces much lower emissions than a straight up dinosaur burning car.

A hybrid car is one of the inventions that drastically improves the efficiency, which is demonstrated by a way less fuel consumption, especially in the urban traffic (where the pollution is the most dire). Electric cars only help reducing the pollution from the large urban areas but the emission is shifted elsewhere.

It is going to be easier and cheaper to rebuild the supply chains for those materials than it is going to be to rebuild the equivalent petroleum supply chain.

Why to rebuild something if the petroleum infrastructure is already there?

And modern (post COVID) EV batteries have about a 0.2 percent failure rate, compared to a 2 percent failure rate for ICE engines in recent years.

Would you buy a 10 year old electric car? Would you be able to resell it later?

 

[gromike]

Would you buy a 10 year old electric car? Would you be able to resell it later?

I would!
Batteries are getting cheaper all the time.
Recell, though I don't know about resale.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

I would!
Batteries are getting cheaper all the time.
Recell, though I don't know about resale.

Recelling an EV battery is not the same as recelling an e-bike one.
Would you buy a 10-yo e-bike?

 

[gromike]

Yes, I have. More like 15 yo. And a sweet ebike it is:

 

[Stefan Mikes]

Did you buy it 5 years ago or are you the first owner?
Is it a conversion or an e-bike right from the factory?

 

[PedalUma]

I would not buy a ten-year-old bike that had any electronic wizbangs like 2016 DI-2, or was carbon, or had a proprietary motor system. I would buy a steel frame that was in great condition for conversion, like a Surley. Or maybe a slightly used Yuba cargo bike for a conversion. I would spend about $700 for a bike that could then outrun and outlast anything commercial from stores, and would be all open source. With the right to repair.

 

[gromike]

Did you buy it 5 years ago or are you the first owner?
Is it a conversion or an e-bike right from the factory?

I bought it 2 years ago from a non-profit bicycle recycler. As such, I assume I am the third owner. It's like a 2010 Giant Twist Freedom.
By todays standard it's not much, but it rides well. Kind of a smile-on-your-face bicycle experience.

 

[scrambler]

Pardon me? In the U.S., the vehicle single occupancy country?

You need to generate the electricity somewhere. What is the overall efficiency in the chain including any losses?

The petrol stations and the infrastructure are already there. Also giving the employment to so many people.


Where is the majority of electricity coming from? How is the energy input in an EV dissipated? Because it is ultimately the heat.

The infrastructures to extract and refine oil are WAY worse than anything involved in the generation of electricity.
The grids are getting cleaner and cleaner.
Where oil is concerned, every step of production AND every step of usage is dirty.
With electricity, production will vary depending on the source but as I mentioned it is getting cleaner as we upgrade the grids and expand renewable, BUT Usage is clean.
The gas station are progressively incorporating charging stations, same people same jobs... Actually better as because charging is still slower than gas filling, the charging sites tend to incorporate shopping and eating infrastructure that people can use to spend the 20/30 mn they are here instead of the in and out of a traditional gas station. More jobs more economic activity
Regarding your Last phrase: "How is the energy input in an EV dissipated? Because it is ultimately the heat."
You do know that:

1. In an ICE, aout 80% of the energy produced is lost and dissipated as heat, which is why they are so inefficient, while in an electric motor it is more like 5% sometimes even less.
2. It is not the heat generated by cars that worsen climate change, but the gas they emit that creates a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere which causes warming. There is none of that with EVs

 

[Chargeride]

Speaking to my friend Gary in the pub last night, which should fill you with confidence.
Anyway he pulls up the actual grid underground infrastructure for my friends house having the charger fitted.

Well he is in charge of the entire underground installations for the local council.
I said 'is it possible for everyone to pull 7kw overnight from that local substation.
'Not a chance in hell, needs upgrading by 200%, its heat cycle would fail.

And youd need to do the same all the way back to the pylons.
At the moment only twenty houses out of 250 have chargers and eight large solar installations.
They will need to control charging and solar production even if it hits 50 houses and he said this area isnt even a bad one.
'Whens it going to be upgraded'.
'There are no plans in 10 year forecasts'.
This will be once in a generation upgrade, but it is very doable if we can get the cash.

 

[Roamers]

I saw an image recently an urban area but of instead of roads there were sheer canyons. There were sidewalks for humans and boards across the canyons for crosswalks. You could really see how much was allocated to cars and how little to humans. Then think of all the acres that are only paved heat islands just for cars. There is no habitat for humans, animals, or plants. As we rebuild we can build toward a move away from a car centric world. Think of a typical shopping mall with three times more parking than retail. That is a lot of useless, unproductive real estate.

In the Midwest, our motor vehicles have humans in them; so the motor vehicle allocation is actually for the humans in them. Works very well here.

 

[Roamers]

Just eyeballing vehicles at the grocery store and post office, I see about ten percent of them having either a rear rack or a tailgate pad

Lobster shack last night. 1 out of 17 had bike rack. 9 out of 17 had 2" ball hitches. My SIL car that we arrived in appeared to be the only one that was E-like (Honda Hybrid). Interesting that she just finished an 8 hour highway trip and when I was guiding her backing out the lane, the engine started after 20 feet rather than staying on battery.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

Modern fossil fuel burning electrical generation turbines are between 60 and 70 percent efficient. Natural gas (methane) can use a combined cycle that makes them the efficiency winners there. On the other hand an ICE vehicle is about 15 percent efficient.

EVs are around 85 percent efficient. So an EV will go about two to three times as far on an equivalent amount of fossil fuel as an ICE vehicle will.

Why rebuild the infrastructure if the petroleum infrastructure is already there? Because most of the petroleum infra in the Untied States is old and nearing the end of its practical service life. The newest refinery on the Left Coast is almost sixty years old. Pipelines and pumping stations also have a finite useful service life. In many cases the capital investment to keep repairing and rebuilding an existing system will exceed the cost of building something new.

Pet peeve: people who argue that the effective lifespan of their pet technology is infinite while arguing that technologies they oppose have a (often exaggerated) very short service life. This turns up with respect to both EV batteries, grid-scale batteries, and solar panels. It is simply dishonest.

On ten-year-old EVs, first off there are lots of older EVs with 200k+ miles on them still on the road still working fine as useful vehicles. What we've learned about EVs is that if they have a decent active battery management system (and most made after 2015 do, and nearly all made after 2022 do) the battery will outlast the rest of the car. There does seem to be a lively used market for EVs (and currently prices for used EVs are rapidly increasing) so I'd feel about as good about a ten-year-old EV as I would a ten-year-old ICE car. And selling would be about the same.

I'd likely feel much better about a used 2023 EV in 2033, just because the technology and reliability have improved that much. And by then there certainly will be a much larger pool of mechanics who know how to work on EVs.

The cheapest and most reliable components of any system are the ones that aren't in that system. There are far fewer moving parts and things that clank on any EV than there are on the cheapest and simplest ICE vehicle. This already shows up in dramatically lower maintenance and service costs for EVs. Since a hybrid has far more clanking parts it won't have that cost advantage and will inevitably have a shorter lifespan.

The best example: basically EVs do not have any transmission at all. The electric motors directly drive the axles. You get reverse by flipping polarity on the DC motor. Unlike e-bike motors, EV motors are designed to be efficient and provide high torque over a larger range of RPMs (another efficiency win for electric vehicles). You don't have to maintain or fix a part that doesn't exist, and you don't get the efficiency loss from friction through a transmission if you don't have one.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

Well he is in charge of the entire underground installations for the local council.
I said 'is it possible for everyone to pull 7kw overnight from that local substation.
'Not a chance in hell, needs upgrading by 200%, its heat cycle would fail.

So you are assuming everyone with an EV draws a full 7kw from the grid overnight every night? So for round figures that is on the order of 70kwh per vehicle per night?

That implies, on average, that everyone is driving more than 300km per day. Just doesn't seem likely or realistic to me.

If you assume a more realistic daily distance of around 80km or less then things likely look different. Very different.

Keep in mind that power companies already sell EV supply equipment ("chargers") that they can actively manage and can distribute the load so everyone isn't charging all at once. Sometimes they even give that equipment away. So there are multiple ways to solve this problem and some of those ways are already solved, if not yet universally distributed.

 

[Chargeride]

He also touched on the obvious, cheap rate off peak will disappear, grids are actually going to be drawn on for 24 hours.

It may even swap in many situations as people setup to use stored power themselves and recharge overnight.

Obviously we are going to need at least the entire energy to run cars being added to the grid, then heatpumps and probably finally trucking.

Its not some kind of Apollo ..materials yet invented , but its still a massive undertaking.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

He also touched on the obvious, cheap rate off peak will disappear, grids are actually going to be drawn on for 24 hours.

It may even swap in many situations as people setup to use stored power themselves and recharge overnight.

Obviously we are going to need at least the entire energy to run cars being added to the grid, then heatpumps and probably finally trucking.

Its not some kind of Apollo ..materials yet invented , but its still a massive undertaking.

As I've said before, the whole petroleum infrastructure we have uses a lot of electricity. If we are converting sufficiently away from fossil burners we will obviously using proportionally less electricity.

If you look at those numbers (comparing what we use for refining and distributing petroleum products and what we'd need to charge millions of EVs) the numbers are pretty darned close. Close enough that I suspect we'd need surprisingly little additional generation capacity.

Think lots of electrical pumps. Lots and lots of electrical pumps that we'd not need to run anymore.

Best estimates for how much additional electricity the US would need if all personal vehicles were electric: 800 to 1100 TWh
Best estimates for how much electricity the petroleum infrastructure (refining and pipelines) use in the USA: around 1000 TWh

In fairness, only about half of the petroleum products we use in the Untied States are refined into gasoline for cars. But still it ain't nothing we are talking about here.

The above numbers are different from an earlier post because I asked the Google slightly different questions. They are, however, in the same ballpark at least.

Around a quarter of US electricity generation is used processing and distributing fossil fuels. 24 percent.

 

[Chargeride]

Thats is incredible, charging stations replacing fuel pumping stations maybe.

The issue is local capacity, but its hardly game over inconvenience to be told you cant charge overnight, but maybe get a discount at a supercharger in the morning.
The power companies will probably be given access to everyones battery level and usage even unplugged.

I mean I hate it, but its the obvious solution to balancing it all out.

I spent a few years balancing out telecom networks, there was a small army of guys driving around moving jumpers while I connected or disconnected route traffic.
Its all done automatically now as the giant frames are now small boxes.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

In an ICE, aout 80% of the energy produced is lost and dissipated as heat, which is why they are so inefficient, while in an electric motor it is more like 5% sometimes even less.

In almost any vehicle, the amount of energy input into the vehicle that eventually is dissipated as heat is 100%. This amount can be somewhat reduced if efficient regenerative braking is applied: hybrids and EVs.

 

[scrambler]

In almost any vehicle, the amount of energy input into the vehicle that eventually is dissipated as heat is 100%. This amount can be somewhat reduced if efficient regenerative braking is applied: hybrids and EVs.

I am not sure where you are getting your science, but this is simply not true, sorry.
in an ICE, about 20% of the input energy moves the car, and 80% just creates heats that gets dissipated (which is why you need a big radiator)
In an EV, 95% of the input energy moves the car, and about 5% creates heat and is dissipated.
If 100% of the input energy was dissipated as heat, the car would not move....

No matter how you look at it, you need to spend 4 to 5 times more energy using oil to move a car than using electricity.

 

[Chargeride]

Stefan is referring to end game for most energy, you could say hes being a smart arse

 

[Chargeride]

The most realistic AI conversation so far.
Like game over stuff.
Some swearing from observer